Advice from medical professionals should be consistent: pregnant and lactating women should be advised to avoid cannabis use, and women (and men) caring for developing children also should be advised to maintain abstinence.

The increasing legalization of medical and recreational marijuana has many implications for food politics. I’ve been collecting these items for the past couple of weeks.

The food editor of High Times, Elise McDonough (@EliseMcD420), announced in a tweet that she would be leaving the post. Is her job open? You will need to contact High Times to find out.

The New York Times reports that pot is becoming Big Ag, as big farms in the Salinas Valley are converting from fruits and vegetables to marijuana. Call it “the industrialization of commercial cannabis.”

Advertising Age describes the difficulties with marketing the edibles—marketers must first educate the “Budtenders” who sell the products.

Dixie Elixirs, a maker of edibles including its new lines of THC-infused sour cherry, grape and lemon-flavored Fruit Tarts and Blazin’ Cinnamon and Citrus Blast Dixie Gummies, spends anywhere from 50%-75% of its marketing budget on education — particularly education aimed at budtenders, said the company’s CMO Joe Hodas.

The total cannabis market is projected to reach $27 billion this year.

But in Colorado, where such things are legal, producers are complaining that the regulatory environment is so difficult that they can’t make a profit.

According to a report in the industry newsletter, Bakery and Snacks, the profit problem was the focus of an education session at a Las Vegas conference on “The Future of Wholesale Baking with Marijuana,” conducted by two producers of infused edibles, Sweet Grass Kitchen and Love’s Oven. Their gripes:

“Regulations are killing the business.”

“The leftover cannabis after extraction…has to be destroyed by bakery employees on camera, and locked in a compost container and sent to a compost facility.”

“Licensed marijuana bakers have to pay around $16,000 per month to the State of Colorado and the City of Denver for product testing conducted by a verified third-party laboratory.”

The labeling requirements are onerous: “It’s very difficult to stamp a baked good like a chocolate chip cookie. We don’t make Oreos. This new law has forced us all to spend a lot of capital on new machines and capabilities that are way above what a non-infused bakery of our size would typically have.”

Startups are always hard. But with half of $27 billion at stake, and more and more states considering legalizing the stuff, I can see why they are hanging in there.

While we are on the topic, a new paper in JAMA reviews statistics on marijuana use in the U.S. and reports 7000 new users a day, and rising. It calls for better surveillance of how much is used, and how.

I will be watching the use and the business of edibles with much interest.

JAMA Pediatrics has just published a report that cases of marijuana intoxication in young children has increased since the drug was legalized in Colorado. The authors are careful to note that the number of cases is small relative to those that occur in kids consuming pharmaceutical drugs or household cleaning products, but the trend is not good.

Nearly half the cases occurred in kids eating foods in which THC (tetrahydrocannibinaol) is a prominent ingredient:

Known marijuana products involved in the exposure included 30 infused edible products (48%): 17 baked goods (cookies, brownies, and cake), 10 candies, and 2 popcorn products…. Ingestion of edible products continues to be a major source of marijuana exposures in children and poses a unique problem because no other drug is infused into a palatable and appetizing form. These palatable products are often indistinguishable from the noninfused products.

Dosing a drug in a “serving size” less than typically recommended for an equivalent food product also can be a source of confusion. For example, a marijuana chocolate bar can contain multiple 10-mg THC single-dose units. In adults, overconsumption of edible projects is associated with an increase in ED visits resulting from dysphoric reactions, panic attacks, and anxiety. Edibles have also been blamed for 3 adult deaths in Colorado.

Pot-laced popcorn?

One concern is that the infused edibles look like normal foods. You have to read the fine print to see the THC label.

Dr. Christopher Colwell, chief of emergency medicine at Denver Health Medical Center…estimated there was a fivefold to tenfold increase in the number of patients — including a sharp rise in the number of adolescents and teenagers — arriving at the hospital after consuming part or all of a marijuana edible.

Colwell said he expected an increase in the number of marijuana cases. But he said he was surprised and concerned with the higher potency of THC in the edibles and the more severe symptoms it can cause.